One important and consistent thread of Charles Taylor’s thought that has not yet received the attention it deserves is his philosophy of freedom. Taylor’s 1979 defense of positive liberty in response to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Conceptions of Liberty” is, of course, well known. But there is a way of seeing reflection on freedom as a thread that runs, sometimes silently but always significantly, through his whole body of work. Taylor can be seen as asking what freedom means, how many varieties (...) it has, what it (or they) require, how it (or they) are supported and promoted, or threatened and diminished. Throughout his work, Taylor tacitly encourages us to think about what types of freedom are possible and desirable for embodied entities. (shrink)

For many liberals, the question "Do others live rightly?" feels inappropriate. Liberalism seems to demand a follow-up question: "Who am I to judge?" Peaceful coexistence, in this view, is predicated on restraint from morally evaluating our peers. But Rahel Jaeggi sees the situation differently. Criticizing is not only valid but also useful, she argues. Moral judgment is no error; the error lies in how we go about judging. One way to judge is external, based on universal standards derived from ideas (...) about God or human nature. The other is internal, relying on standards peculiar to a given society. Both approaches have serious flaws and detractors. In On the Critique of Forms of Life, Jaeggi offers a third way, which she calls "immanent" critique. Inspired by Hegelian social philosophy and engaged with Anglo-American theorists such as John Dewey, Michael Walzer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, immanent critique begins with the recognition that ways of life are inherently normative because they assert their own goodness and rightness. They also have a consistent purpose: to solve basic social problems and advance social goods, most of which are common across cultures. Jaeggi argues that we can judge the validity of a society's moral claims by evaluating how well the society adapts to crisis--whether it is able to overcome contradictions that arise from within and continue to fulfill its purpose. Jaeggi enlivens her ideas through concrete, contemporary examples. Against both relativistic and absolutist accounts, she shows that rational social critique is possible.--. (shrink)

"Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century", Historical Inevitability", "Two Concepts of Liberty", "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life". These four essays deal with the various aspects of individual liberty, including the distinction between positive and negative liberty and the necessity of rejecting determinism if we wish to keep hold of the notions of human responsibility and freedom.

Modernity is not that form of life toward which all cultures converge as they discard beliefs that held our forefathers back. Rather, it is a movement from one constellation of background understandings to another, which repositions the self in relation to others and the good.

Interpretation, in the sense relevant to hermeneutics, is an attempt to make clear, to make sense of an object of study. This object must, therefore, be a text or a text-analogue, which in some way is confused, incomplete, cloudy, seemingly contradictory--in one way or another, unclear. The interpretation aims to bring to light an underlying coherence or sense.

Contemporary social science tends to suffer from too many misplaced attempts at mathematical or game-theoretical formulation, and much effort is wasted in either propounding such formulations, or in showing their inanity. Jon Elster does not entirely escape this himself, but Logic and Society is truly remarkable in pointing the way to some possibly very relevant formalizations. These are particularly to be found in the chapter on 'contradictions of society'. There Elster attempts to delineate the properties of certain self-frustrating predicaments of (...) action, and to relate them as well to Hegelian-Marxist conceptions of contradiction. It may be, however, that the relevance of this analysis is restricted to societies whose form of life has become atomistic, and whose members thus function in an individual-calculative way in many spheres of life. But even so, formalizations of the kind Elster provides would be useful in defining one kind of historically evolved society among others. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas asserts, in the Preface to Knowledge and Human Interests, that a radical critique of knowledge, that is a metacritique of epistemology, is only possible as a social theory. In this essay, Garbin Kortian discusses the implications and philosophical import of this thesis, which is central to Habermas's work, through a critical account of the German philosophical tradition in which it stands. He relates the 'metacritical dimension' of Haberbas's thought to Hegel's critique of Kant, Marx's critique of Hegel, and (...) the Frankfurt school's critique of positivism. Kortian presents his perspective on the philosophical problems Habermas's argument faces: the primacy of practice, this philosophy of understanding and the hermeneutic concept of understanding. This book, which was originally published in French, will interest students of philosophy and of the social and political sciences. (shrink)